


you call me late at night, i pick up every time

by its_tortle



Series: tumblr drabbles and ficlets [7]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Comfort, Ficlet, Fluff, How is that not a tag, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Phone Calls & Telephones, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Reading Aloud, Sleep, Steve can't sleep, The Neverending Story References, Tumblr Prompt, except it turned out longer than intended lmao, sam is sleeping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:01:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27479224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/its_tortle/pseuds/its_tortle
Summary: written for the prompt "It's okay, I couldn't sleep anyway" for my wonderful friendhelena<3
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: tumblr drabbles and ficlets [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1951201
Comments: 6
Kudos: 64





	you call me late at night, i pick up every time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hbalbat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hbalbat/gifts).



> original post [here](https://its-tortle.tumblr.com/post/634348022153740288/hi-luisa-could-you-do-16-for-the-fluff-prompts)
> 
> this ended up way longer than i intended it too, oops. i hope y'all like it anyway. also, if you read my other stuff, peep the fact that this is set in the same timeline as [my other ficlet for helena!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26768923)
> 
> title from closer to you by clairo

The light from outside is painting stripes on the ceiling. 

Four of them are wide, stretching from the corner of the room until just over Steve’s bed, and three narrower, shorter ones sit below them. The light is warm, and it makes the dim illumination of the room almost orange. Every couple minutes, it flickers a bit, and occasionally a shadow of a fly or moth will pass over it. 

Because it’s artificial light from the street lamp, it stands still, but as Steve lies there staring at it, he imagines it moving like a sun would. He imagines it inching across the room minute by minute, until it’s not on the ceiling over his bed, but painting stripes of light over to his right, over Nat and Sam.

Unlike him, they’re both sleeping, huddled together under the duvet of the cheap motel bed, their chests rising and falling in a slow tandem. Steve thinks about taking a picture of the way Natasha is curled into Sam just so he can tease her for it later, but he also doesn’t want to risk waking them. They deserve the rest, especially after the day they’ve had.

It had been particularly harrowing, even for their standards. 

Intel had told them that the base in the Slovakian mountains was small, that they would be in and out in less than an hour. They hadn’t been prepared for the sheer number of agents and just how deeply the base went into the mountain. It had ended up taking just over five hours and too many deaths and a few broken bones on Steve’s part. 

He can feel those bones now, one fractured in his forearm and a few of his ribs, stitching themselves back together. His arm will be nearly fine by morning, and his ribs will feel merely like bruises. 

Suddenly, unbidden, Steve recalls how before the serum, back in the scruffy Brooklyn streets, his bones would sometimes take months to heal. He also kept making them worse, probably, because he didn’t figure a broken bone was an excuse not to call out an asshole. 

When he would tell Bucky this, his best friend would roll his eyes and call him the asshole.

The orange light of the room is penetrated by a whiter, bluer light. 

Steve frowns and turns to where his phone is charging on the nightstand. Sure enough, the screen is lit up.

He grabs it and glances at his lockscreen, at the picture he had changed it to just yesterday. It’s Bucky in Wakanda, drenched in gold light and mid laugh, looking like a dream Steve thought he had all-but lost.

He’s so enamoured with the photo all over again, that he nearly misses the reason his phone lit up in the first place. His notification bar shows an incoming call.

With a grin on his face, he answers it. 

“Hey Buck,” he whispers. 

“Hey.” There’s an audible smile in Bucky’s voice. “Sorry for calling so out of the blue, I just-” He cuts himself off. “Wait, where are you right now?”

“Slovakia.” 

Nat shifts in the bed beside him and Steve hopes he doesn't wake her despite his efforts to be quiet.

“Shit, sorry,” Bucky swears. “It’s like three AM there, I can-”

Steve interrupts him. “It’s okay, I couldn’t sleep anyway.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, what’s up?”

He can hear Bucky grin. “You’re the best and I feel really bad for calling for such a stupid reason now.”

Steve huffs out a little laugh. “Well, I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Right, so.” There’s a shuffle on the other end of the line as Bucky sits down on what’s probably his sofa. “I don’t even really know how to put this into words and it’s definitely a stupid reason to call you at three AM, but I was just getting ready to go to sleep and I had this- I don’t know. Moment? I guess?”

There’s a silence as Bucky looks for the right words, and Steve waits. The stripes on the ceiling flicker.

“I just realized that I washed my sheets this morning even through I didn’t _really_ need to, and then I showered and I put on some fresh pajamas, and I was making some tea so that I could drink that and read a bit before I turn in, and I’ve been doing stuff like this for weeks now and I didn’t notice.”

Steve is already grinning, but wants Bucky to continue. “What kind of stuff?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky says a little helplessly. “Just little stuff. Like, I’ll leave the blinds open in the evening so that when I wake up, there’s a pink light in the room. Or I’ll use the lemon shampoo cause I think it smells nice or reread Alice in Wonderland for the fourth time cause it makes no sense and it makes everything here make more sense. And I have a plant now, one I saved from being trampled on by Ntando and his rowdy brothers. I _named_ it, Steve! I call it Anastasia for no reason. And I use the turquoise cereal bowl all the damn time just because it’s my favorite color.”

Steve huffs out a little laugh, and feels that it’s wet. He doesn’t know when he started to tear up, but he’s in no position to stop it.

Bucky goes on. “And I just- I guess I just had an epiphany tonight that I’m doing all those things, and that I don’t remember the last time I was doing them. It took me a whole while to get back into a semi-normal rhythm of just surviving and now I’m- I don’t know. Living, I guess. Not just surviving.”

At that, a tear really does escape Steve’s eyes, and he lets out something between a laugh and a sniffle. “That’s great.”

“Are you _crying_ ?”

And then Steve is laughing, full-bodied, and then Bucky is too. His still broken ribs ache in his torso and he must have woken up at least Nat, if not Sam, but he’s too happy to care. 

Bucky has named a goddamn plant and Steve wants to shout it from the rooftops.

When he calms down enough to take notice of his surroundings, Nat is indeed glaring at him, albeit half-heartedly. 

He shoots her an apologetic smile and watches as she suppresses a smile of her own and then turns back to Sam’s warmth. Her unfamiliar head of platinum blonde hair settles on the pillow in a smooth wave, because of course she doesn't get bed head.

“I’m proud of you,” Steve whispers into the phone, and he’s never meant anything more.

“Thank you,” Bucky smiles. Steve can picture him looking down at his feet, bashful and so incredibly pretty. 

He wishes he could see it.

“I’ll be back in a week,” he finds himself promising. “We have another lead we want to check out in Poland in a few days, but I’ll be on the next jet out.”

A short silence gives way to the quiet static of the call. It’s not uncomfortable. It never is.

“I miss you,” Bucky interrupts the static.

“I miss you, too.” And then, because it’s true, Steve adds in an even quieter whisper, “So much.”

The lines on the ceiling are interrupted by the wings of a moth. They look giant against the white plaster, flapping one, two, three times before disappearing from sight.

“Read to me?”, Steve finds himself whispering into the phone.

Bucky used to read to Steve all the time, back before Steve could see clearly. They’d sit huddled in blankets in front of the dwindling heat of the stove, and Bucky’s voice, deeper each year, would gracefully wrap itself around the vernacular and lull Steve to sleep. He’d done it a few times during the war, and again that night almost two months ago in Wakanda when neither of them could sleep.

“Of course.”

There’s a shuffling on the other end of the line, but it lasts for only about a second.

“Okay,” Bucky announces when he returns to the call. “So, I’m reading The Neverending Story right now, and I could start from the beginning or where I am in the middle of page 195.”

Steve smiles. “Page 195 will do.”

“Even if you have no idea what’s going on?”, Bucky asks, like he always does.

“Even if I have no idea what’s going on,” Steve confirms, like he always does.

Steve can hear Bucky smile through the phone, and then he begins to read. His voice has always been so wonderful to Steve, so calming and warm and familiar. He can picture exactly how Bucky’s lips move around the sounds and at what point his scrappy Brooklyn accent will be particularly strong. Bucky’s voice is safety, and home.

“And with these words from the Childlike Empress, all the tiredness that had collected in Atreyu on his Great Voyage, fell over him like a dark veil. But it was not the oppressive tiredness of exhaustion, but rather a reposeful and peaceful desire for sleep. There was so much else that he wished to ask the golden-eyed Giver of Wishes, but now it seemed that she had removed all the wishes in his heart with her words, and left only one lone, overpowering wish, that of sleep. His eyes fell closed, and still sitting up, without collapsing, he was already gliding over into the darkness.”

Bucky goes on, and Steve’s consciousness dwindles. 

It's probably a mere combination of love and exhaustion and happiness, but right then, falling into a semi-peaceful sleep in minutes, Steve could swear that Bucky, like the Childlike Empress, is magic. It's the only thing that makes any sense to him at all.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> (if the neverending story excerpt sucks, it's because i only own the book in german and i tried my hand at translating)
> 
> thank you for reading! if you enjoyed, for love of a god i don't think i believe in, don't be shy!! your comments and kudos are a great part of what makes writing so rewarding 💕
> 
> follow me on [tumblr](https://its-tortle.tumblr.com/) if you are so inclined. :)


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